“Certainly,” agreed Miss Dammers briskly. “I rang him up, and put the point to him. From what I gathered, not even the police had thought to put it before. And though he answered it in a way I quite expected, it was clear that he saw no significance in his own answer. Mr. Bendix told me that he had gone there to receive a telephone message. But why not have had the message telephoned to his home? you will ask. Exactly. So did I. The reason was that it was not the sort of message one cares about receiving at home. I must admit that I pressed Mr. Bendix about this message, and as he had no idea of the importance of my questions he must have considered my taste more than questionable. However, I couldn’t help that.
“In the end I got him to admit that on the previous afternoon he had been rung up at his office by a Miss Vera Delorme, who plays a small part in Heels Up! at the Regency Theatre. He had only met her once or twice, but was not averse from doing so again. She asked him if he were doing anything important the next morning, to which he replied that he was not. Could he take her out to a quiet little lunch somewhere? He would be delighted. But she was not quite sure yet whether she was free. She would ring him up the next morning between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock at the Rainbow Club.”
Five pairs of brows were knitted.
“I don’t see any significance in that either,” finally plunged Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
“No?” said Miss Dammers. “But if Miss Delorme straightly denies having ever rung Mr. Bendix up at all?”
Five pairs of brows unravelled themselves.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Fielder-Flemming.
“Of course that was the first thing I verified,” said Miss Dammers coolly.
Mr. Chitterwick sighed. Yes, undoubtedly this was real detecting.
“Then your murderer had an accomplice, Miss Dammers?” Sir Charles suggested.
“He had two,” retorted Miss Dammers. “Both unwitting.”
“Ah, yes. You mean Bendix. And the woman who telephoned?”
“Well—!” Miss Dammers looked in her unexcited way round the circle of faces. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Apparently it was not at all obvious.
“At any rate it must be obvious why Miss Delorme was chosen as the telephonist: because Mr. Bendix hardly knew her, and would certainly not be able to recognise her voice on the telephone. And as for the real speaker … Well, really!” Miss Dammers looked her opinion of such obtuseness.
“Mrs. Bendix!” squeaked Mrs. Fielder-Flemming catching sight of a triangle.
“Of course. Mrs. Bendix, carefully primed by somebody about her husband’s minor misdemeanours.”
“The somebody being the murderer of course,” nodded Mrs. Fielder-Flemming. “A friend of Mrs. Bendix’s then. At least,” amended Mrs. Fielder-Flemming in some confusion, remembering that real friends seldom murder each other, “she thought of him as a friend. Dear me, this is getting very interesting, Alicia.”
Miss Dammers gave a small, ironical smile. “Yes, it’s a very intimate little affair after all, this murder. Tightly closed, in fact, Mr. Bradley.
“But I’m getting on rather too fast. I had better complete the destruction of Mr. Sheringham’s case before I build up my own.” Roger groaned faintly and looked up at the hard, white ceiling. It reminded him of Miss Dammers, and he looked down again.
“Really, Mr. Sheringham, your faith in human nature is altogether too great, you know,” Miss Dammers mocked him without mercy. “Whatever anybody chooses to tell you, you believe. A confirmatory witness never seems necessary to you. I’m sure that if someone had come to your rooms and told you he’d seen the Shah of Persia injecting the nitrobenzene into those chocolates you would have believed him unhesitatingly.”
“Are you hinting that somebody hasn’t told me the truth?” groaned the unhappy Roger.
“I’ll do more than hint it; I’ll prove it. When you told us last night that the man in the typewriter shop had positively identified Mr. Bendix as the purchaser of a secondhand No. 4 Hamilton I was astounded. I took a note of the shop’s address. This morning, first thing, I went there. I taxed the man roundly with having told you a lie. He admitted it, grinning.
“So far as he could make out, all you wanted was a good Hamilton No. 4, and he had a good Hamilton No. 4 to sell. He saw nothing wrong in leading you to suppose that his was the shop where your friend had bought his own good Hamilton No. 4, because he had quite as good a one as any other shop could have. And if it eased your mind that he should recognise your friend from his photograph—well,” said Miss Dammers drily, “he was quite prepared to ease it as many times as you had photographs to produce.”
“I see,” said Roger, and his thoughts dwelt on the eight pounds he had handed over to that sympathetic, mind-easing shopman in return for a Hamilton No. 4 he didn’t want.
“As for the girl in Webster’s,” continued Miss Dammers implacably, “she was just as ready to admit that perhaps she might have made a mistake in recognising that friend of the gentleman who called in yesterday about some notepaper. But really, the gentleman had seemed so anxious she should that it would have seemed quite a pity to disappoint him, like. And if it came to that, she couldn’t see the harm in it not even now she couldn’t.” Miss Dammers’s imitation of Webster’s young woman was most amusing. Roger did not laugh heartily.
“I’m sorry if I seem to be rubbing it in, Mr. Sheringham,” said Miss Dammers.
“Not at all,” said Roger.
“But it’s essential to my own case, you see.”
“Yes, I quite see that,” said Roger.
“Then that evidence is disposed of. I don’t think you really had any other, did you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Roger.
“You will see,” Miss Dammers resumed, over Roger’s corpse, “that I
